Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters New from OL - Here’s What the Ammo Shortage Revealed About the Industry

An interesting read.
---

Here’s What the Ammo Shortage Revealed About the Industry

Between erratic availability of components, wildly swinging prices, and limited production capacity, the ammunition industry is scrambling to serve shooters
BY ANDREW MCKEAN | PUBLISHED FEB 17, 2023

In his four decades of running D&G Sports and Western in Glasgow, Montana, Darrell Morehouse has never seen ammunition pricing and availability as unpredictable as it’s been in the past three years. That’s telling, considering the several ammo shortages he’s seen through the decades.

The rest here. https://www.outdoorlife.com/guns/ammo-shortage-2023/

Great read Steve! Thanks

Very interesting and thanks for posting that link.

Good post!

Steve,thanks for sharing.

Thanks everyone. McKean did a good job with this.

Primers seem to be the biggest problem, no matter where you live. I cannot remember who posted about the new primer plant being built a while back, but from my perspective this has been the weak link for many years - even before this recent shortage.

From the article,

Yes, so, where are all these primers that are supposedly being made?

I don't think the new primer factories are on line yet.

Did you actually read the article? If so, you might want to try again.

This is interesting, particularly the swapping. I was wondering if something like that was going on between federal loading the eldx bullet and the prc line. Maybe
Federal trading some brass for bullets as not seen much hornady prc brass/anmo on shelves or much federal premium ammo on shelves either (or anything with nosler / berger bullets for that matter

Lou

Good article. Thanks for posting. I have enough powder and bullets but would feel more comfortable with more primers, especially given Fed 210s seem like they are extinct.

Did you actually read the article?

Thanks for posting. Interesting about big manufacturers component swapping

Free choice and free markets are a cornerstone of the American model...but in hindsight it seems the corporate executives that have made the marketing decisions since the first Obama Buying Panic in 2008 have compounded the problems of the industry. The endless introduction of new cartridges into an already crowded field, just seems nuts when you drill down into the actual ballistics and discover that there are only a very few clicks difference between the newest wonder cartridge and the old 'been there done that' cartridge. Lines of powders that apparently were going to fit the Euro model of save the planet for Greta and her polar bear turned out to be a short lived 'flash in the pan'. A few powders, that due to insufficient testing, had to be recalled/dropped. You can blame covid supply chains as much as you want...but for the uninformed consumer like myself, I am inclined to blame sales and marketing idiots influencing corporate execs who are not able to take their eye off the next bright shiny object. To my view, this a parallel to pushing electric vehicles when there is no grid to sustain them, nor will there be.

That has been happening for decades, though on a lesser scale--and when brass was sold to another company, it was head-stamped for the other company.

Not just in the shooting industry either, it's been SOP in the automotive industry at least since I worked for GM in 1979. At the aluminum foundry where I worked at the time, we made various aluminum castings for every one of the (at that time) "Big Three" US automakers.

Does anyone know if the rumor that I heard about PPU building a new ammo factory in one of the Carolinas is true or not. I know that Palmetto is putting out its line of ammo now.

I would think that the shortage of components like primers would be lessened by increased imports, but it hasn’t happened enough. Factor in the war in Ukraine and NATO countries upping their readiness to the shortage and it gets uglier.

It hurts that they mentioned the 30-30 and 300 Sav by name as ones that are relegated to the backbones. Those are two I shoot a lot

I enjoyed that article.